Impact of Gulf Oil Spill on Smallest Creatures Remains Unknown

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Each
morning for about a week and a half, Holly Bik opened up her
computer, plotted a route on Google Maps, and then spent the
next eight or so hours driving along the Gulf of Mexico,
stopping at around five or six different beaches a day,
collecting samples.

Despite arriving at the Gulf Coast five months after BP's Deepwater
Horizon oil spill, "everywhere I went there was some sign of
oil," said Bik, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of
New Hampshire, who is studying how the oil spill has affected
diversity of the tiny creatures that live in the intertidal
regions of the beaches. "It was awful," she said.

Under a grant from the National Science Foundation, Bik and a
research team from the University of New Hampshire, Auburn
University in Alabama, and the University of Texas, San Antonio,
will now analyze the DNA from the samples she took to determine
what species are present, and then compare the results to samples
taken before the spill.

Life's
a beach

Bik covered about 1,300 miles (2,100 kilometer) driving from
beach to beach. The back seat of the car was loaded down with
containers of dry ice to keep the samples fresh, and her primary
piece of equipment was a 4-inch- (10-centimeter-) long tube that
she would stick in the sand to collect samples at various depths.
The sample would then be bagged, labeled and put on ice.

She saw evidence of oil at sandy beaches, muddy beaches, tourist
destinations, national parks and out-of-the way beaches.

"It was shocking how far the impact of the spill reached," she
said. "Turning up at a beach and finding a globby ball of tar
that smelled like diesel, and I wasn't even seeing it at its
worst."

Bik, who also blogged and posted to Twitter about her experience,
tweeted during one of her sampling trips: "Went swimming on
Pensacola beach, swallowed seawater by mistake, then found oil on
beach."

Many of the beaches in Florida had begun to regain tourists and
cleaning crews were minimal, but even in Panama City, a popular
tourist destination, and far from
the spill site, Bik said digging into the sand still turned
up signs of oil.

Bottom
of the food chain

Despite being small, and often not visible to the naked eye, the
so-called meiofaunal organisms the researchers are studying are
still vitally important to the ecosystem to which they belong.

"The meiofaunal organisms — the fungi, algae and microscopic
animals — form the
base of the food chain. They are important for providing food
for primary consumers. If you have major impacts on the bottom of
the food chain, that will work its way up, and you will see
obvious impacts on the big creatures," Bik said.

Nematode worms, in particular, are incredibly abundant and
diverse and play an important ecological role in marine
environments. Between hundreds of thousands and millions of
different species can live in just one square meter (about 11
square feet).

Aside from forming the base of the food chain, nematodes are
important in nutrient cycles, such as making nutrients like
nitrogen available for other organisms.